Jason Pontin is the editor of Red Herring magazine. And he isn't impressed by the leadership of either Enron or Hewlett-Packard.
In a recent editorial, he wrote:
"What Mr. Skilling and Ms. Fiorina have in common is their indifference to the substance of their businesses. They are all "message." They despise their employees, their shareholders, and their customers; they have little interest in the products their companies sell; but they love themselves and the trappings and power of their rank."
It's a terrific article.
What Mr. Pontin articulates so clearly is what I see in the copy that is written for and by so many companies, on and off the Web.
Many copywriters and marketers appear to have very little respect for their customers, and they appear to have little interest in their products or services. They become cynical. Products become commodities to be shunted out of the door and customers are simply victims waiting to be mugged.
But even if you put aside those cynics and are left only with marketers who are sincere in their intentions, you are often left with 'messages' that are superficial.
Messages are too often crafted with the purpose of simply maximizing that quarter's revenues. When that happens, 'messages' get a bad reputation. They are quite correctly recognized as being no more than clever devices designed to make a few bucks. They are about the surface of the company, and not about its substance.
Building your message from the surface only leaves you with a thin, weak and ineffective communication.
An example of this that jumps to mind is the loss of substance in automotive advertising.
Picture in your mind ads for Volvo and Jaguar motor cars from a few years back. Those ads conveyed a brand and a message that came from deep within those companies' cultures, histories and characters.
Now, of course, both those companies are owned by Ford. And the messages I read about Volvos and Jaguars are beginning to sound more and more like the messages for a Ford Taurus. (And indeed, the latest Volvo and Jaguar cars themselves are starting to LOOK more and more like a Ford Taurus.)
When you don't dig deep, when you just scrape your message from the surface, you end up with a sameness that communicates little value either for the customer or for the company.
Call me old-fashioned, but as a young copywriter I was fortunate enough to work at a time when there was still such a thing as a 'factory visit'. I would go to the client's place of business, spend time on the shop floor, speak with the people who created and built that company's products. The whole creative team would take enough time and dig deep enough to make an honest attempt at creating messages that reflected that company's values at a level that really meant something.
Now turn to the online business world, and you find a whole new generation of messages that are hastily drawn from the surface alone.
Such superficiality is not only ineffective in terms of marketing, but is also disrespectful to the company, its employees, its products and services and, above all, its customers.
